Edmund Spenser
c. 1552–1599
Biography
Edmund Spenser was an English poet of the late sixteenth century, born in London around 1552. He was educated at the Merchant Taylors' School and at Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he became friends with the scholar Gabriel Harvey. His first major work, The Shepheardes Calender, appeared in 1579 as a set of pastoral poems arranged by the months of the year. In 1580 he went to Ireland in the service of the new Lord Deputy, Arthur Grey, and he spent much of his later life there, holding land in County Cork, where his estate lay near Doneraile.
His masterpiece is The Faerie Queene, an allegorical epic that celebrates Queen Elizabeth I and the Tudor dynasty. Books I to III came out in 1590, and books IV to VI followed in 1596. Spenser wrote it in a nine-line stanza that later poets named the Spenserian stanza after him, and his handling of verse became a model for many English poets who came after him. He also wrote the sonnet sequence Amoretti and the wedding poem Epithalamion, which celebrates his marriage in 1594 to Elizabeth Boyle. In prose he wrote A View of the Present State of Irelande, a harsh dialogue about English rule in Ireland that was not printed until the mid-seventeenth century.
The Nine Years' War reached his Irish home in 1598, when Hugh O'Neill's forces forced him out and his castle at Kilcolman went up in flames. He went to London, where he died in 1599, and he was buried in Westminster Abbey near Geoffrey Chaucer, in the part of the abbey that came to be called Poets' Corner. The book on this site, The Faerie Queene, Book I, is the opening part of that epic. Its hero is the Red Crosse Knight, a knight who stands for holiness, who sets out with Una to free her parents' kingdom from a dragon, and whose faith is tested along the way.
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Books
The Faerie Queene, Book I
by Edmund Spenser
The Redcrosse Knight, who stands for Holiness, rides out with the lady Una to kill the dragon that holds her parents captive, and is led astray by the false Duessa and the wiles of Archimago and Despair. Spenser's twelve cantos in the nine-line stanza he invented set the…
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.